Just as companies obsessed over story points during agile transformations, they now focus on superficial AI adoption rates. True value comes from rethinking organizational workflows and bottlenecks, not from mandating tool usage or tracking superficial engagement metrics.

Many organizations miss AI's transformative potential by limiting its use to optimizing current workflows. The real opportunity lies in fundamentally rethinking how work is done, much like AWS enabled entirely new business models beyond just cheaper hosting.

Shift focus from viewing AI as a tool for individual or team productivity to a force for fundamental structural change in how work is organized and executed across the entire company. This requires a mindset that moves beyond incremental improvements.

Measuring AI success solely by productivity gains is short-sighted, often leading employees to do the work of multiple people and burn out. The goal shouldn't be to "spin the wheel faster" but to reinvest saved time into higher-value strategic work that achieves 10x, not 10%, improvements.

The initial impulse with AI is to use it for efficiency, which often leads to producing more low-impact work faster. The true value is unlocked by focusing AI on achieving a specific, high-value outcome, with productivity becoming a secondary benefit rather than the primary goal.

Simply making existing processes faster with AI yields marginal gains. The real wealth-building strategy is using AI to fundamentally rethink your business, transforming value propositions and creating new revenue streams. The goal should be transformation, not just acceleration.

Drawing a parallel to the slow adoption of PCs in the 90s, Boris Churney argues companies won't see AI productivity boosts by simply layering it onto old workflows. The biggest benefits come from placing AI at the core of the business and redesigning processes around its capabilities, eliminating old bottlenecks entirely.

Individual employees can appear hyper-productive by using AI to expand a bullet point into a report, but if their colleague then uses AI to summarize it back to a bullet point, the net result is zero. This "coordination neglect" creates organizational churn without real progress.

True productivity gains from AI will mirror the adoption of electricity. Early factories that just replaced steam engines with electric motors saw little benefit. The revolution happened when they completely redesigned the factory floor around the new technology. Similarly, companies must reimagine entire workflows around human-AI collaboration.